Bruce Ely/The OregonianNBA games, last seen in Portland in April, are expected to return starting Dec. 25.

Just after the clock struck midnight in Portland, news started filtering out of New York: the NBA is back.

Just under five months after the NBA's owners locked out the league's players after the collective bargaining agreement expired June 30, the sides reached a tentative agreement on a new CBA.

The agreement will still have to be formalized, then ratified by the league's owners. Also, the National Basketball Players Association -- which was dissolved as the players' negotiating body -- will have to be reformed, and its approximately 430 members will have to approve the deal. The sides also will have to agree on so-called "B-list" issues that will be part of previous CBAs -- such as draft age and drug testing.

Assuming all that happens, the league will play a 66-game season starting Christmas Day. The end of the regular season will be pushed back one week to April 25, and the NBA Finals also will start a week later.

"We're optimistic that that will all come to pass, and that the NBA season will begin Dec. 25, Christmas Day," commissioner David Stern said in a joint news conference with union head Billy Hunter.

Stern said the plan is to have free agency and training camps both start Dec. 9. The league is believed to have wanted to preserve its Christmas showcase, when the league has the TV sports landscape to itself. Stern said there will be a triple-header on Dec. 25.

To make sure games are played on Christmas Day, the league will hold much shorter training camps than it did after the 1998-99 lockout -- the only other NBA season that was shortened by labor issues. That year, training camps opened Jan. 6, and games started Feb. 7.

The sides met for 15 hours starting Friday morning and emerged after 3 a.m. Eastern time to announce the agreement. Stern and Hunter both said they expect their sides to approve the deal.

Neither Stern nor Hunter revealed details of the tentative agreement, saying the deal needed to go through attorneys and that they still needed to brief their constituents.

Friday's meeting was held as a litigation conference to discuss settling the antitrust lawsuit players filed against owners and also the league's lawsuit against the players. The sides agreed to drop their respective suits.

However, the meeting soon turned into kind of familiar negotiating session that sides have held for months, with union president Derek Fisher re-joining the discussions after fading into the background after the union filed to notice of disclaimer Nov. 14 to dismiss itself as the players collective bargaining body.

Hunter said it could take three days to a week to settle the litigation. Stern said the league's labor relations committee -- which includes Trail Blazers president Larry Miller -- will be briefed Saturday.

Deputy commissioner Adam Silver said the agreement will help rein in higher-spending teams from having the competitive advantage they have had in the past, although it does not go as far as the league wanted.

"It's a compromise," Silver said. "It's not the system that we should out to get in terms of a harder (salary) cap, but the luxury tax is harsher than it was in the past deal, and we hope that it's effective."

Stern said both sides were cognizant of employees of arenas, parking facilities and restaurant who are part of "the literally thousands of people who are dependent upon the playing of our games."

"We resolved that, despite some bumps even this evening, the greater good required us to knock ourselves out and come to this kind of understanding," Stern said.